BOMB Magazine Award Winner
Gregory Eddi Jones’ (born 1986, Syracuse, NY; lives Philadelphia and New York) work interrogates politics of common cultural images through appropriation and re-authorship. He holds a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from Visual Studies Workshop, both Rochester, NY. Jones has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. His self-published books are in both national and international collections, including the Brooklyn Museum; The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, all New York; as well as the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Jones was selected as FOAM Talent in 2019.
Statement from the Artist:
“Betterland” is a collection of works sourced from stock photographs and other common cultural pictures which are re-authored through digital and physical mark-making. Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922), the pictures scrutinize shared meanings while escaping the burdens of photography’s traditional relationship to truth.
I make these pictures by digitally manipulating then inkjet printing appropriated images onto non-absorbent substrates, allowing me to manipulate wet ink on paper. I then dry, scan and manipulate the works digitally before producing the final inkjet print.
I consider the process a means of “un-photographing” common images familiar to all whose media diets are saturated by advertising images and promising visions of a better world. My work breaks down the perceived truth values we hold toward photographs. In doing so, pictures are cracked open and purged of their original communicative intent; moved into a more ambiguous space with potential for broader interpretation than originally intended by their sources.